The Media Research Center did its best to capitalize on the death of Charlie Kirk. After that, it complained about coverage of Kirk’s memorial service. Tim Graham huffed in a Sept. 23 post:
The networks were mostly respectful toward the Charlie Kirk memorial service on Sunday in Arizona, unlike some left-wing outlets.
“HuffPost” — formerly The Huffington Post — ran the headline “KIRK MEMORIAL RAGEFEST: TRUMP ‘HATE’ EULOGY.” The New York Times headline was “At Kirk Service, an Extraordinary Fusion of Government and Christianity.”
To put it mildly, this was not how The Times covered the funeral of former president Jimmy Carter, the Southern Baptist. One of their headlines touted Carter as a “practitioner of good works,” not a threat to that “separation of church and state.”
Graham seems not to have read his own website, where the day before, a post by Craig Bannister gushed at how Franklin Graham hyped that fusion of government and Christianity:
“The name of Jesus was certainly heard at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service today,” Reverend Franklin Graham proclaimed Sunday, thanking God for how the speakers at the event praised Kirk’s open and devout faith.
“Speaker after speaker lifted up Jesus Christ, and this included many of President @realDonaldTrump ’s cabinet. The Gospel was clearly shared for all who were listening,” Rev. Graham explained in a social media post.
“As I watched, I couldn’t help but say, ‘Thank You Lord!’ Graham wrote, echoing Vice President JD Vance’s observation that “the service wasn’t a funeral—it was a revival!”
“It is my prayer that Charlie’s voice will be multiplied as thousands of young people step up to speak truth on our college campuses, including the eternal Truth of the Gospel,” Graham wrote.
Graham offered no evidence that anyone ever said that about Carter’s funeral.
Graham went on to describe how podcast guest and fellow MRCer Curtis Houck “recalled how the Kirk service was uplifting, and Charlie Kirk understood that we need to engage respectfully with those we disagree with, something that the left refuses to do.” It wasn’t mentioned that Houck and his employer routinely disrespect those they disagree with, from Houck smearing Oliver Darcy as a “Benedict Arnold” for escaping the right-wing bubble to Nicholas Fondacaro libelously attacking “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin as a “staunch racist” to going Godwin on social media monitors by calling them “digital brownshirts.” Graham, Houck and the MRC has yet to publicly renounce such malicious disrespect in the wake of Kirk’s death, so Houck’s suggestion that he and his employer “engage respectfully” with critics is a hollow lie.
Alex Christy whined that Stephen Miller’s violent language at the memorial was called out:
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated there was some nice-sounding talk about toning down the inflammatory political rhetoric, but some on the left didn’t get the memo. After Kirk’s memorial service, some internet-dwelling lefties compared Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s speech to that of future Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s 1932 speech about Horst Wessel. Snopes’s Nur Ibrahim set about fact-checking this claim on Thursday, but couldn’t bring herself to give it a false label. Instead, she just observed how there are “rhetorical similarities.”
The problem was clear right away, as the first part of Miller’s speech Ibrahim chose to compare was when he said, “The day that Charlie died the angels wept. But those tears had been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand.”
That was supposedly comparable to Goebbels’s, “So our dead comrade Horst Wessel wrote, and we are fulfilling his prophecy. The others may lie, slander, and pour their scorn on us — their political days are numbered.”
[…]Miller as saying, “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities… We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create.”
That is basic Western Civilization and American exceptionalism rhetoric. Nur somehow missed the absence of “Berlin” or “Munich” or anything that could be affiliated with Nazism in Miller’s remarks.
For her final comparison, Nur cites Goebbels as saying, “Well, we the people have awakened! We have risen against oppression, 15 million people have joined in an army of revenge.”
As for Miller, he said, “They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.”
As if all the other comparisons weren’t incredibly forced in order to give this accusation credibility, what Nazis and conservatives consider good, virtuous, and noble is not the same.
Christy continued to miss the point:
It was only then that Nur informed readers Miller is Jewish, “We have previously covered Miller’s background as the descendant of asylum seekers who escaped anti-Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe.”
It is hard to imagine an article about surface-level comparisons to Goebbels being written about a Democrat. It is not enough to say Goebbels and Miller both used the idea of building things. You need to look at what it was they say was being built.
Christy offered no example of a Democrat speaking with the same anger that Miller did, and he failed to criticize Miller’s anger.
Steve Malzberg groused that a baseball player was called out for skipping a game to go to Kirk’s memorial, trying to excuse the player’s absence:
This past Sunday, some 90,000 people attended the memorial for Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. One of those in attendance was Chicago Cubs rookie third baseman Matt Shaw. Shaw missed his club’s 1-0 loss in Cincinnati. The Cubs are assured of making the playoffs which begin next week, and hold a small lead over the San Diego Padres for the first Wild Card spot in the National League, but the whole situation did not sit well with New York Mets veteran announcer Gary Cohen.
During Tuesday night’s Mets-Cubs game, Cohen decided to use his SNY platform to weigh in on Shaw’s decision. “Shaw had Cubs world in a tizzy this weekend when he was not here for the Cubs game with the Reds. A game they lost 1-0 and in which his lack of presence was felt.”
Cohen makes it sound as if the Cubs might have won, if only Shaw had played. I’ m not sure exactly how that was the case. The Reds did not score their one run on an error by Shaw’s fill-in at third base. Shaw is only hitting around .225, with an OPS near .680. Nothing great by any means.
Malzberg concluded with his own weird whine: “I wonder what Gary Cohen would have said if the 2020 season had not been shortened due to COVID, and memorials for George Floyd were held in September of that year, during the pennant race, and a player, or players decided to skip a game to attend one of them. If I had to bet, I’ d bet he would not call it weird or egregious.” That’s some desperate whataboutism there, Steve.